Bay 12 Games Forum

Visiting a partner in a hospital is something of a pet peeve of mine where this subject is concerned. I have no idea why hospitals do this sort of thing, but my personal experience with hospitals is that they tend to be staffed by harried, pushy people with a certain sense of entitlement when it comes to enforcing their rules. That particular issue is one that I have a lot of sympathy for, but it does not excuse the wholesale demonization of Christians I saw in this thread earlier.

Well, to help you understand the why of the hospitals are doing that, in a lot of places in the states it's strictly illegal -- and this is at least in part because of anti-homosexual litigation (The latest anti-homosexual marriage law in Florida, ferex, prevented heterosexual couples who were not married or in civil union from visiting their partner in the hospital.). Family and only family can visit a hospitalized individual without some significant hoop jumping (when it's allowed at all) and going around that can have significant legal ramifications.

And, to reiterate, what you saw wasn't a wholesale demonization of Christians -- it was targeted dislike for a particular portion of them that exhibites a particular form of prejudice.

Again, to be very specific, what we are talking about here is an openly gay woman demanding to partake of a religious sacrament that she did not qualify for under the tenets of the religion.

Heh, I think you could well agree that both yourself and others have taken the matter being discussed beyond that specific issue.

The Bishop over the church involved said that the priest should not have publicly condemned her, and even that was not accepted by people posting about the issue here.

Mm... you've read the clarification on that point. The reason it incensed people here is because of how the church stated it. Saying the equivalent of "We're sorry he got caught doing it" doesn't garner much sympathy.

So bottom line, churches have to do whatever any non-Christian demands of them or risk being characterized as bigoted. I think perhaps in this case some folks outside the church are the ones being belligerent, demanding, and self righteous here.

You're blatantly overstating things here, though; Christian churches don't have to do "whatever any non-Christian demands of them," but they certainly can't expect to not be censured when what they're doing is seen as inappropriately discriminatory (i.e. bigoted). That religious practice doesn't exempt said practice from moral scrutiny is something we can both agree on easily, I hope.

How did it GET stigmatized?

Did God come down out of heaven and stigmatize it?

I have shown several examples from several different cultures where it somehow repeatedly gets stigmatized. How is that, do you suppose? "I don't know" is not a particularly heartening argument for forcing the normalization of a behavior that has collected a lot of stigma all over the world for millenia.

Last point; here, though -- as been noted, racism and xenophobia have also repeatedly caused the stigmatization of individuals throughout history. Repeated stigmatization isn't sufficient support for discrimination.

If homosexuality is not inherently unwholesome to humans, please explain to me why it is that people avoid participating in the behavior? If people are neutral toward it, then why would they nor participate in it in approximately the same frequency as masturbating?

Can you please explain to me why people avoid having physical relationships with people they don't find physically attractive? People are fairly neutral to that, but I don't see such relationships nearly at the same frequency as masturbation.

I couldn't cite the precise socialogical and psychological cause behind that, but the cause of both behaviors are the same.

And yet, all around the world, for the vast majority of people, homosexual relations simply are not acceptable TO THEM PERSONALLY. And while all of you are loathe to admit to it, me and everyone else who are not sold out to the idea that homosexuality is the best thing ever, and a civil right, and that there just must be something intrinsically wrong with anyone who disagrees with that attitude, know in our own experience that even to see the behavior is to be at least mildly sickened.

I've actually said this before, fairly recently in the thread. If it stopped at being mildly sickened, stopped at a lack of personal attraction, stopped before people started stripping freedoms from homosexual individuals and started treated them like second class citizens, there would be basically no issue. If peoples reactions toward homosexuals and homosexual relationships was equivalent to their reactions toward people they didn't find personally attractive and relationships between such people, there wouldn't really be a problem. It doesn't stop there. Thus the problem.

Would you be comfortable in accepting that guided persecution on a social and legal level based strictly on personal dislike is something we should abhor?

I do not feel you are being honest. I also feel most of you are deeply motivated by anger and hatred. I feel that because of the way I am repeatedly treated when having this discussion with people deeply committed to the cause of gay rights.

I'd give you anger, actually, because there tends to be that involved as a motivation. It's understandable that people become angry (To wit, righteous anger) when they see cruelty, intolerance, persecution, etc., over something that does little to no harm (In today's world, homosexual acts are no more medically dangerous than heterosexual ones, when performed with the appropriate considerations). Unfounded -- or, if you'd prefer, insufficiently founded -- persecution does, in fact, piss me off a little. That in this particular case it's done in a way that, to me, perverts the teachings of one of the great people of human history doesn't help.

But the hatred I've seen is only hatred of hatred, not of something else. I've very rarely seen strong support for social and legal persecution of people who are against homosexual rights that even remotely approach the level of support coming from said people for social and legal persecution against homosexuals.

I also see in history, and have made mention of aspects of it to you without any real response from any of you to the contrary, that there is an anti-religious undercurrent in recent western society that has no good basis in fact, has been repeatedly debunked in terms of people, even if they abandon Christianity, typically going back to some neo-pagan or "new age" religious views rather than becoming good atheists as Enlightenment era philosophers thought would happen.

In other words, people experience life spiritually (I think most likely due to the experience of being conscious and of perceiving themselves as making choices) and therefore reject the exclusively materialistic model of reality.

I'll admit sudden curiousity how this applies, actually. There are, in fact, religions that make no issue of homosexuality, so irreligion isn't exactly directly tied to what we're talking about. And, as I actually noted a bit earlier, the general sentiment is not anti-Christian as a whole; it's specifically against the aspects of Christianity that the people in question see as unwholesome.

What I don't get though, is why you, Truean, seems to be angry at the organisation, when in this case the organisation as far as I understand actually told the priest he did wrong.

Ah, because as True's interpreting it (near as I can tell), the organization didn't tell the priest he did wrong, they told the priest that he basically shouldn't have got caught doing it. I.e. the approbation wasn't for the reprehensible act, but for doing said act in public.

That's fair to get miffed about.

Finally played a bit more. MuWz got channel energy, started applying the Imp Solution to everything. D/clvl 9 now, about to hit ten. Putting away for a bit, though, heh.

Slash'em's graphical nethack plus some other stuff thrown in. Where that puts it in relation to DCSS is a matter of taste, heh.

You kiddin'? People love literature. A lot.

It just doesn't have a monopoly on storytelling anymore like it did 150 years ago. It is but one medium, with its own strengths and weaknesses, among many.

Thiiiisss.

Though most of what turned me off of reading the classics regularly is that most of it's damn depressing. Sex, death, and racism, all day erry day bah. Not even the fun, lighthearted sex either, but the torrid Freudian shit. It gets oooollldd.

There are some rules and guidelines for this thread.[snip]
4.  I will try not to police language too much, but use common sense.  If your common sense is subpar in this direction, you will be informed.

-> Guideline: this includes appropriation of words surrounding sexual assault and violence in general, as well as illnesses and hateful slurs, to make a point as a metaphor.  I will be gentle about this in most cases other than those concerning rape.

Folks. Please, let's not. Yes?